Neo Rauch

Mechanic of Dreams

Neo Rauch once expanded a variation on Descartes famous meditation and said, “I dream therefore I am.” In an era where thinking is often outsourced to computers, dreaming is an activity intrinsically human. Dreams can magically leave us feeling simultaneously connected to universes of time— present, past, and future. Neo Rauch’s work stands before us like a portal that links our era with all of its Postmodern confusion back to a time when fairy tales served as plausible short stories. With feet firmly rooted in his native Saxony, Rauch engages an ethereal undercurrent of symbol and storytelling.

Neo Rauch has often said that his overall mission is to re-enchant the world and take off where the Romantics left off. In reading many of his previous interviews, one gets the sense that Rauch engages a spectrum of pre-Enlightenment and Romantic occult wisdom. He mentions the Akasha, bursts of pantheism, time continuum, and Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea as representing the awareness of one’s placement within a grand design.

Allowing hypnagogic visions to guide his foray into new compositions, Rauch works mostly in stream-of-consciousness with no preliminary drawing. Flowing from his trance state, the painting takes on a life of its own. Rauch spoonfeeds his creature-like creations from brushes held by large, clumsy-looking gardening gloves with paint he mixes on the floor in containers before his canvases. He keeps a schedule like a factory worker: 9 AM–7 PM, five days a week, working on three to five large canvases at a time. On the weekend he lets the paint dry, takes a break from the studio, and spends time with his family working in his garden.